XBMC 4.0 for the Original Xbox

https://www.xbox-scene.info/articles/announcing-xbmc-40-for-the-original-xbox-r64/

by zdw • 8 months ago

201 92 8 months ago

xbox-scene.info

KeplerBoy• 8 months ago

XBMC on the original Xbox was so unbelievably far ahead of it's time, it's crazy and that's not just nostalgia talking.

pimlottc• 8 months ago

XBMP is the main reason I got my Xbox, it was fantastic. And later I even played a few games on it!

bonsai_spool• 8 months ago

Yes! So many streaming sources and high performance/responsiveness.

cowboyscott2• 8 months ago

24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.

Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.

rightbyte3• 8 months ago

I don't think Xbox had 1080p support? That would be somewhat annoying to be limited by.

afavour• 8 months ago

You may need to remove your rose tinted glasses. No doubt it was incredible for its time but not even being able to play 1080p video puts it underneath most set top boxes you can get today.

rightbyte3• 8 months ago

Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.

robofunk• 8 months ago

If my memory is not faulty it was even able to stream movies from multi volume rar files over SAMBA which felt like magic. IYKYK

Sanzig• 8 months ago

I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment that it really was far ahead of its time. I'd torrent a movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious 480p on a tube TV.

This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt like something from the future.

phantasmish3• 8 months ago

I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”.

I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it.

Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back.

And no, alternative skins never improved that any.

Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help.

I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems.

Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system.

[edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/

lproven• 8 months ago

I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV.

Me too. It was a life-changing tool: take some cast-off free hardware and a bit of free software, using an exploit to an old game that cost me £2 and a tool to put it on a memory card that cost me £5 (both second-hand off eBay), I had a media player that could stream to my (free) TV.

I spent many hundreds of hours watching it, and about 30 mins of playing games on the thing ever.

I still have it but it's in a basement in another country. Now I want to see if it still works, and if I can upgrade it.

stuaxo2• 8 months ago

Same, and I count Kodi in the not good enough interfaces.

Two things make it worse: The Xbox controllers were great for navigation vs a remote control.

SMB1 was much easier to setup and use vs modern samba.

torh• 8 months ago

Still have the original Xbox, working like a charm. Not sure which version of XBMC it has, but the internal disk is full of old series and movies.

Still has a share on my computer mapped up, but the original Xbox can't keep up with the big files.

madaxe_again• 8 months ago

I fondly remember modding my first Xbox to install it, and it just being so much better than anything else available at the time that I immediately retired my… man, I can’t even remember the brand. They did a nice line in network attached media players in the early 2000s.

I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.

abrookewood• 8 months ago

100% Even when I stopped playing Xbox games, we would take that pimped out machine everywhere. Long before there was Netflix, there was an Xbox running XBMC loaded with movies and TV shows of questionable origins. Good times!

AnotherGoodName• 8 months ago

I still get comments along the lines of ‘remember when you had Netflix before Netflix? Man that was awesome, you could have made billions right?’ from former housemates and friends. I had XBMC in the living room connecting to my server which auto downloaded all the latest tv and movies. So to them i had something much better then Netflix well before Netflix got into online streaming.

opello• 8 months ago

It was also a really nice MythTV frontend at some point which was easier to set up than additional home theater PCs that connected to the central PVR.

qingcharles• 8 months ago

I was contracting for Microsoft/MSN building "official" TV media player interfaces (Windows Media Player Extenders I think the hardware was called) at the time. There was definite inspiration in both directions: the XboxMediaPlayer/XBMC folks were looking at what we were putting out and we were looking for clever things they were doing to steal. All our Xboxen were modded. Obviously they won the battle in the end, though :)

tclancy• 8 months ago

I felt the same about ReplayTV and integration with the PS2. The future is always unevenly distributed.

filmgirlcw2• 8 months ago

XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.

I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!

kotaKat• 8 months ago

Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…

I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].

[1] http://archiv.sega-dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...

monocasa• 8 months ago

In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.

dylan604• 8 months ago

People with the skills to design these things impress the hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.

Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted that a font could crash a computer. The more things change, the more they stay the same it appears.

filmgirlcw2• 8 months ago

That link just unlocked a core memory I haven't thought about since I was 17 years old, so thanks for that!

nick_• 8 months ago

Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this" but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?

echelon_musk6• 8 months ago

If you do go ahead and fire up your old Xbox, it would probably be worth you running XCAT.

Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.

https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox:XCAT

xeromal• 8 months ago

I remember that there were 2 games that you could use to modify your xbox but I only remember 1 game. Mechassault.

echelon_musk6• 8 months ago

Mechassault, 007 Agent Under Fire and Splinter Cell.

More recently there are other game exploits, such as THPS4. However, since ENDGAME you don't even need a game to softmod.

whalesalad• 8 months ago

I always wanted to mod mine, but was worried about Xbox Live ban (even on OG xbox)

This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...

Not on exhibit to the public.

devilbunny• 8 months ago

I never had Xbox Live, but I wanted to preserve the option so I used an Xecuter that included an on/off switch that you used double-sided tape to attach just under the power button. Flip the switch and reboot to the stock BIOS and you were good to go with online gaming.

mentos• 8 months ago

Same. Executer mod chip?

I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.

Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories

joshstrange• 8 months ago

That's what my dad used to mod our OG Xbox. My neighbor (unmodded) and I would split the Blockbuster Gamepass (I think that's what it was called) for $30/mo (IIRC) for unlimited rentals, just 1 at a time. We'd take it home, rip it to my Xbox then put the disk in his and we'd play through whatever the game was until we finished or got bored, then rinse and repeat.

Had I been able to drive at that time I would have tried to get the family van that had pull down TV (tiny) screen in it so I could do what you did.

1970-01-01• 8 months ago

Should have named it XBMC 360 because it has come full circle and it would continue their barbaric culture of naming it 'X' but building it for the complementary set of X. (i.e. it works on everything but XBOX 360)

par• 8 months ago

XBMC really takes me back. I used to love using this, and then when it switched to Kodi I got a bit confused but kept using it. Finally I moved over to Plex because I recall having some issues with Kodi i can't remember these days. But while I love Plex, i don't love the proprietary feeling of it, and would still prefer something truly open.

bombcar3• 8 months ago

Jellyfin + Infuse on Apple TV has been quite wonderful. Jellyfin alone works fine if you have various other players.

JeremyNT• 8 months ago

Kodi works great with Jellyfin, too :)

GaryBluto2• 8 months ago

As much of an achievement as this is, I think much of the charm is sadly lost in later versions of XBMC.

echelon_musk6• 8 months ago

Would be lovely if there is a backported version of the Project Mayhem 3 HD skin. I remember using a backported version for Kodi on my Linux box many years ago, however I doubt it is still maintained!

GaryBluto2• 8 months ago

I have the source code to an old version of XBMC sitting round somewhere, including the Project Mayhem skin in non-XBOX-specific file formats if you're interested.

unbehagen• 8 months ago

I loved XBMC and still use Kodi to this day. Back then, I even proposed and POCed what's now a part of their Add-On system, essentially a fuse-like virtual file system forwarded to Python. Before that, each Add-On had to bring its own UI. This was basically my first OSS contribution and the community was really supportive and welcoming.

AshleyGrant• 8 months ago

I used that to build my XM Radio Online plugin!

jajuuka• 8 months ago

That's some impressive dedication to continue homebrew on the OG Xbox in 2025. Much respect for that alone. Very cool to see such an old console get a first class modern media player experience.

wildzzz• 8 months ago

There are still new hardware upgrades and add-ons being developed for the original Xbox. I myself contributed heavily to a new HDMI upgrade.

anonymousab• 8 months ago

I remember installing XBMC with a 360-style "blades" interface and being blown away by how much smoother and nicer it was then the blades interface on the Xbox 360 at the time.

Obviously the OS wasn't doing as much as an Xbox 360 was, but as an end user, it made me perpetually annoyed at what we "could have had" on the 360.

And then Microsoft changed the 360 UI to their windows 8 uwp Tile-style UI with even more ads and I realized that I underestimated how bad things could get.

accrual2• 8 months ago

Apparently the "blades UI" 360s are quite sought after. I wonder if any progress has been made on restoring the stock firmware. I never had one myself unfortunately, mine came preloaded with a later OS.

asdff2• 8 months ago

Those ancient 360s are probably doomed to hardware failure however. They didn't seem to fix the issues with the 360 being essentially disposable until very late in the release cycle.

caseyf7• 8 months ago

I fondly remember opening up my Xbox to solder a mini board to the Xbox board. Later, they figured out how to add it without the additional board.

kristofferR• 8 months ago

I didn't get consoles as a kid, but after moving out I bought my first console - a PS3 I jailbroke.

Showtime/Movian was my TV media player for years, actually worked pretty great until I got a Shield. Cool to see it is still being developed, like XBMC.

deaddodo• 8 months ago

Gotta love this:

Despite the constraints of the Xbox’s single-threaded 733MHz CPU, XBMC 4.0 includes improvements to task scheduling that allow multiple activities to run concurrently.

As if the Pentium 3 wasn’t regularly used to run fully multi-tasking operating systems for years.

My old 400mhz P2 was able to play videos, catalog my music collection, download files, and let me edit code simultaneously just fine.

accrual2• 8 months ago

Yeah, the Pentium 2 and 3 CPUs were very capable. Even today I feel they can do a lot of work with the right tools and some shims to access modern stuff (SSH, RDP).

Maybe XBMC's kernel wasn't designed for multitasking and they're now adding better support. I could understand wanting to throw the whole CPU at whatever the user was doing, especially in early days.

laweijfmvo• 8 months ago

it’s getting harder and harder to find an easy to install 32-bit linux distro, though

urbandw311er• 8 months ago

Wow, there’s a trip down memory lane. I remember writing a whole addon called “Tivox Control Station” that let you watch your TiVo recordings on your XBox. Such happy times to be part of that modding community when everything was open and hackable.

themafia• 8 months ago

Lacking any expensive or specialty equipment the procedure was intense.

Fully boot up an XBox. Very carefully remove the IDE cable from the internal Hard Drive.

Start booting a PC. Press the "Pause" key on the keyboard right before BIOS starts it's POST. Very carefully connect the IDE cable from the PC to the XBox Hard Drive. Press any key to resume boot.

Now you can boot the XBMC installer and copy it over to the XBox Hard Drive. Shut everything down. Appropriately connect the Hard Drive. Power back up. You now have a modded XBox.

rasz• 8 months ago

I also went hardcore hotswap route when uploading my first xbox launcher, followed by eeprom dump and decoding password from that. There are other hardcore methods available:

- sniffing IDE bus with Logic Analyzer https://hackaday.com/2011/04/28/ide-bus-sniffing-and-hard-dr...

- reading password directly from locked drive HPA (service area) using MHDD https://hackaday.com/2011/02/18/hard-drive-password-recovery... yes its stored in plaintext

Nowadays the second method is conveniently build into FATXplorer as a one click action https://fatxplorer.eaton-works.com/2024/05/31/fatxplorer-3-0...

thot_experiment• 8 months ago

Let me just hit up the bot on irc so i can get the one time ftp login to xbins and grab this.

nirav72• 8 months ago

I remember paying $250+ to some company out in CA and shipping my Xbox to them. Recommended by some friends. A week later it came back modded and a new HD installed. Along with a 10 page guide on how to use xbmc. Including mounting a remote windows share using smb. Or transfer the media files to the Xbox via FTP. This was around 2004. At the time, there wasn’t any easy way to play downloaded or ripped content on a TV from over the network. So a modded Xbox was a game changer.

emilbratt• 8 months ago

I remember modding my Xbox and putting XBMC on it. One of my fondest memories is actually playing games directly off the hard-drive. One of the great "side-effects" of that was basically cutting loading times almost in half.

I especially remember the loading animation in the game Crash Bandicoot - Wrath of Cortex. Crash Bandicoot himself would keep falling during the loading screen. (note: PS2 version had another looking version). The game loading screen for Xbox was designed so that the camera movement nicely panned throughout it during the time the loading took, but due to the loading time being shorter the "animation" was cut short.

..just a fun little thing that stuck with me. :)

EDIT: Oh! I found videos on youtube demonstrating the "difference".

Here is the original experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1327&v=jLf9EZWLins

Here is the experience when cut short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1157&v=Vk8AuLhnu58

matthewpick• 8 months ago

Fantastic timing on this post. I was just chatting with coworkers this week about my childhood modded Xbox and showed them screenshots of the Avalaunch home screen.

https://avalaunch.net/

XBMC 4.0 for the Original Xbox

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